Thoughts

Mail is the lifeblood of communication today. Whether it’s personal, business, or somewhere in between, losing your stored mail is a big deal. Not receiving your e-mail in the first place - an even bigger deal. I was reminded of this last night in quite a rude fashion: Google locked me out of my Gmail account because of “unusual account activity.” Now, unless checking my e-mail, and replying to e-mails, is unusual (that’d be an interesting definition of unusual, for an e-mail account!), I don’t know what possibly could have caused them to lock the account. To make matters worse, I was in the middle of negotiating a business deal when it happened. My Gmail remained locked all night, but was finally available again this morning.

Now, when they lock your account, this is what they tell you:

For your security, we may temporarily disable access to your account if
our system detects abnormal usage. It will take between one minute and 24
hours for you to regain access, depending on the behavior our system
detected.

Abnormal usage includes, but is not limited to:

- Receiving, deleting, or popping out large amounts of mail (via POP) in a
short period of time
- Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce
back)
- Using third party file-sharing or storing software, or software that
automatically logs in to your account and that is not supported by Gmail
- Multiple instances of your Gmail account opened
- Browser-related issues. Please note that if you find your browser
continually reloading while attempting to access your inbox, it is likely
a browser issue, and it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and
cookies.

If you feel that access should not have been disabled, please visit
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=53897 for
troubleshooting tips.

Now, go to that link there, and tell me if that’s any more useful than the message left (as above). It isn’t. So I contact Gmail support. And what do they send me? Well, here’s the “surprise”: What I copied above wasn’t the message left to me when I tried to go to Gmail, it was the SUPPORT E-MAIL BACK TO ME. Freakin useless.

Well, I’m lucky enough that I’m involved in web companies to the extent where I don’t actually use Gmail as my provider - I simply use it as a webmail platform. I changed some redirects on my servers, and created a new webmail account directly on my servers, so I missed no urgent messages. Everybody is not so lucky. So here’s my advice: never trust a 3rd party with your important information, especially one that you have no business relationship with (you’re not paying). I *do* have a business relationship with Google - they even send me Christmas presents every year (aww, how nice), but when it comes to Gmail, they still couldn’t care less about me, you, or anyone else.

Unfortunately, if you do use Gmail (or anything short of your own domain & hosting) as your primary e-mail inbox, you don’t have much choice as to relying on them. But at the very least… BACK UP YOUR DATA. There’s several ways to do this:

1. The nerd method, using a UNIX/Linux box and Getmail + a cronjob: Click here
2. The mostly nerd method, using Cygwin (UNIX emulator) and fetchmail: Click here
3. The non-nerd method, just using a simple POP3 client (Outlook, in this example) : Click here

The list goes on. You’re capable of doing a Google search, I assume.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under Tech Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.